A Tune that took me back in time.

I was playing Pathfinder with my live group on Saturday night. Our DM has a huge fantasy music collection which he sets on random while we play. It’s all very nerdy and I love it. Anyway, all was normal until this tune popped up. Go and click on it and let it play while you continue reading this post.

Hearing this brought a wealth of old memories back to me. Memories of exploring a new world, of slowly gaining more powers, of finding new and wondrous discoveries around every corner. Perhaps I was creeping down a kobold mine, or hunting bandits in a field of grapes. Trading shots with evil mages on a little island, or entering what seemed a ruined and abandoned tower. All of these thoughts and feelings flashed through my mind and then came the realisation that this world no longer exists. Cataclysm redid everything, including the music, and there is now no way of going back, creating a new character and reliving some old times from the past. I find that just a little bit sad.

Did Blizzard made a mistake with Cataclysm? One of the defining features of MMOs is the fact that you can’t easily go back in time; it’s not supposed to be a static environment. But the way that music made me feel, if the old WoW still existed I would have downloaded the game again when I got home just so I could wander around Elwynn Forest and soak up some old times spent with friends.

I might have a hunt around and listen to some more tracks. I always loved the Westfall tunes.

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7 Responses to “A Tune that took me back in time.”

This and the Dun Morogh music do the same thing for me (I played a dwarf main.)

I think Cataclysm was a backwards step. The new 1-60 leveling quests aren’t awful but so many of them have such a childish feel that I can only conclude that Blizzard is targeting the 12-year-old demographic these days.

I’d love to be able to go back and play vanilla WoW again. There are heaps of old quests that are no longer in the game that I’d love to re-do. Plus I preferred Warsong Gulch, Alterac Valley, and many other things the way they were in vanilla. I really hate it when people (including blues) try to say that it’s just nostalgia and if we could go back to vanilla we’d get bored of it really fast. I recently replayed Warcraft 1 and 2 (thanks to DOSBox) and I’m part way through 3 now. I’m loving it and not getting bored at all.

The tragedy is that all the data is sitting right there on our old vanilla install discs and we aren’t allowed to touch it. I think it would be great if the WoW community got together and launched a giant campaign to coerce Blizzard into formally granting open source developers legal permission to create a server replacement that would allow legitimate owners of vanilla to replay it as a single-player game. Perhaps they could also allow limited LAN play so that a small number of players could do an instance or battleground together too. Blizzard has already admitted they there are more people who used to play WoW and stopped than there are current subscribers, so this seems unlikely to cost them many subscribers. Instead I think it would generate a lot of goodwill amongst exactly those older players who’ve stopped playing, and it would cost them very little to do since open source developers would do the actual work (heck, they’ve already done most of the work with the illegal private servers that are out there right now.)

Ah yes. Back in the good old days when men were men and the women were men also, when every day was summer and sunshine, when the young still had manners…

I do get where you’re coming from though. Back then it was all still pretty new. WoW changed how we think of MMOs, for better or worse. However, let’s not make the mistake in thinking that the game was better back then, at least not when it comes to quality. It’s not just the technology that’s improved, but developers have come up with ways of implementing that into storytelling. Simply put, there’s just better tools to do the job these days. The game industry in general has taken giant leaps forward in the past decade.

I think the biggest thing that has happened in the MMO scene is that we’ve matured and grown up with the games. We aren’t able to look at it very objectively any more, since we’ve been in the world for years now. The community is full of veteran players, who often look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. It’s hard to remain objective when your passion is involved, and gamers are certainly an extremely passionate group. With the veterans, we have a whole new generation of gamers as well, who don’t even know what the games used to be. They don’t know how good they have it!

The community has changed fundamentally. In an MMO this is probably the biggest contributing factor, to how much you can get out of the game.

I remember when the Cataclysm beta first had music stepping into Elwynn Forest and hearing the updated theme and getting chills as the nostalgia came flooding back. That and the Barrens/Westfall theme are the most nostagia-inducing for me as I recall the way I felt when as made my first steps out into this amazing world.

Honestly, I get really sick of hearing people rant about how terrible Cataclysm is. The game didn’t devolve so much as the playerbase did, as they seem to expect the devs to somehow create for them that same experience they had early on, in a world they now go out of their way to know to learn every corner of.

Following on from Sjs’s idea to allow open source developers access to the original content:
I wonder where the break even point lies between number of subscribers and overhead ? I’m speculating that perhaps Blizzard are missing an opportunity to give the nostalgic masses exactly what they want – for a price of course.

Which is precisely why I’ve been playing on a private server, patched to 3.3.5a for the last year, and loving every moment of it. I can still play the (what I regard in my own mind as) the ‘real’ WoW, the game that I fell in love with before Cataclysm utterly trashed everything I enjoyed about the game, turning it into a pale, superficial shadow of it’s former self.

My one prevailing worry is that my enjoyment of the private server hinges completely upon the continued participation and goodwill of that server’s host. There is nothing to stop him from simply pulling the plug one day, either as a result of rising costs, or change of personal circumstances; shelving all the effort put into my characters, and leaving me homeless once more.

I therefore feel that the suggestion to allow those of us who have WoW install disks the option to play pre-Cataclysm content on a purely single player basis is a great idea. It would certainly solve all my problems at a single stroke.